But The Telegraph is widely read, and Delingpole’s wrongness is the usual kind of stuff that will make the rounds of the deny-o-sphere, so I’ll stick my head in to the maelstrom momentarily.

The real meat of his column starts with this:

At the heart of the problem lie the computer models which, for 25 years, have formed the basis for the IPCC’s scaremongering: they predicted runaway global warming, when the real rise in temperatures has been much more modest. So modest, indeed, that it has fallen outside the lowest parameters of the IPCC’s prediction range. The computer models, in short, are bunk.

Next, the real rise in temperatures has not fallen outside “the lowest parameters” (he means lowest range) of the predictions. Models use different input information to predict what temperatures will be like. Some have finer time resolution, some will have better modeling of various factors, some make different assumptions than others, and so they produce different (though generally very similar) outputs. When taken together, they provide a range of predictions, and while current land and sea surface temperatures are lower than the most likely prediction, they are still within the range of predictions the models have given.

It’s true that temperatures have flattened out over the past decade or so, but this doesn’t mean global warming has stopped, that we’re cooling, or the models need to be thrown out. Quite the opposite, which I’ll show in a moment.

And finally, no, the models aren’t “bunk”. In fact the models are doing a pretty good job of representing the physical nature of what’s going on. The real problem isn’t with the models, it’s with people interpreting them, or, more accurately, misinterpreting them. Again, I’ll cover this below.

Delingpole continues:

This is why the latest Assessment Report is proving such a headache to the IPCC. It’s the first in its history to admit what its critics have said for years: global warming did “pause” unexpectedly in 1998 and shows no sign of resuming. And, other than an ad hoc new theory about the missing heat having been absorbed by the deep ocean, it cannot come up with a convincing explanation why.

Well, actually, no. That’s like seeing a corpse with a bullet wound to the head and saying “Except for the bullet wound to the head you cannot come up with a convincing explanation why this person is dead.”

When we cycle back into warmer surface temperatures, the land surface temperature will go back up. We’ve seen this happen before, over and again in the past. You have to be careful not to make any long-term claims about that either; scientists are careful to average over both cooler and warmer cycles to look at the overall trend. Denialists love short-term trends, because they can cherry-pick them to make it look like temperatures are stable or even dropping, when in reality the overall trend is up, up, up.

So the computer models aren’t “bunk”, as Delingpole claims. They’re pretty good, and our best bet for figuring out what’s going on. They get better at doing so over time, too.

This latest report is hardly a “headache” for the IPCC, but since they’re ramping up the rhetoric so much it’s obviously a thorn in the side of deniers. Who, I suppose, are a headache for the IPCC.

I could go on; Delingpole’s article is a rich source of the same tiresome anti-reality claims. But as usual, when you dig even a tiny bit into things like this, the denials fall apart. I suggest you keep your browsers pointed to locations of good information, like Skeptical Science, Dana Nuccitelli and John Abraham’s column called “Climate Consensus-the 97%” in The Guardian, and follow real climate scientist Michael Mann on Twitter.

And not that I’m looking forward to this, but eventually the ocean cycle will switch back to warming, and land surface temperatures will once again begin their inexorable climb. What will the deniers say then? I can guess: They’ll forget all about this “pause”, and focus on some other cherry-picked event to muddy the waters. They are as predictable as, well, the climate.